Faculty Profile for Dr. Aimee Villarreal

Biography Section

Biography and Education

Dr. Aimee Villarreal trained as an anthropologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she received her Ph.D. in 2014. Villarreal is an interdisciplinary scholar who writes about sanctuary movements and other radical acts of rebeldía for social justice and sustainable futures in the US-Mexico borderlands. She was a Clements Fellow for the Study of Southwestern America at Southern Methodist University (2017-2018) and took part in the first Latinx anthropology seminar at the School of Advanced Research (2019). Villarreal contributed as lead researcher and producer for the award-winning documentary animation Frontera! Revolt and Rebellion on the Río Grande (2014). Her forthcoming book with the University of North Carolina Press, Sanctuaryscapes in the New Mexico Borderlands, tells time-traveling stories about how people band together to create communities of protection and care in response to oppression. She is currently directing a documentary film about Chicanx drag king performers in San Antonio.

Teaching Interests

As an anthropologist whose research and disciplinary training are grounded in critical ethnic studies, Chicanx feminist thought, and decolonizing methodologies, Dr. Villarreal's pedagogy is generative and draws from various sources and theoretical influences. She teaches courses that bridge anthropology and ethnic studies and aim to cultivate moral agency and social responsibility to guide students in becoming conscious of the social, historical, and ideological conditions that shape global conditions and lives. This knowledge or conocimiento is essential to personal growth and the enactment of social justice. Dr. Villarreal has taught courses in Mexican American and Indigenous studies, feminist and queer theory, transnational migration, borderlands ethnography, religion, and Afrolatinidad.

Research Interests

Dr. Villarreal's scholarship explores secular and sacred crossings in historical and contemporary sanctuary practices and movements across time and space. Her forthcoming book, Sanctuaryscapes in the New Mexico Borderlands, with the University of North Carolina Press (2024), redefines sanctuary as a broad canopy of activities rooted in Indigenous survival strategies and cultivated in regions of refuge and rebellion in the Americas.

Her current research focuses on restorative justice and racial reconciliation processes related to public representations of history and identity in the North American Southwest. She is also interested in Chicanx spiritual politics, queer performance as activism, and public pedagogy. She is directing a documentary film about Chicanx drag performance and activism in San Antonio, Texas.